Sometimes all I want is a warm, comforting, familiar, medium weight Euro. With Elephants. Big Elephants. Big, colourful Elephants.
Amritsar: The Golden Temple
Designer: David Heras Pino
Publisher: Ludonova
2023
How to Play:
In Amritsar: The Golden Temple - a mancala / rondel / area majority / contract fulfilment game designed by David Heras Pino and published by Ludonova - players “represent the different personalities of the time who helped the Maharaja of the Sikh Empire with the reconstruction of the Golden Temple”.
In practice grab one of those unmissable big, bright, chunky elephants - it’s going to hold and transport cubes that you will obtain throughout the game. Place your elephant on one of the four main ‘districts’ of the main board. Workers of various colours are randomly dotted around the centre of the main board during set up - grab a stack of them from any particular section and sow them ‘mancala’ style in a clockwise direction. The section that the final worker lands in is where you will take an action but if you have been a clever little Board Gamer then you will have probably done your very best to make sure that the colour of that worker matches the colour of one of the available action tiles so that you can take both a main action and a lovely colour matching secondary action. Chef’s Kiss Time: if you have been a VERY clever little board gamer you will have also ensured that all of this has taken place in the exact same area that your elephant is located (it trundles around the board at the start of each of your turns - moving the classic ‘one space for free or pay a coin for each additional space’ rondel style). If your worker and your elephant do indeed collide this turn then reward yourself with yet another action - more often than not dropping off one of those cubes on your elephants back to compete for area majority in that same district.
The main actions that you take each turn are broadly classic Euro fare – get resources, spend resources, climb tracks, buy and sell at a market, upgrade your player board etc. Four turns - a ‘decade’ - later score up each of the district’s area majorities, make sure you have paid your taxes (a ‘feed your workers’ style mechanism – taxes increasing the more you upgrade your player board with yummy bonuses and contracts to fulfil) and get ready to go again. After all three decades it’s the end of the game and in addition to the points you will have accrued during the game you will hopefully have also smashed a good amount of points from the four strategic contracts that you started the game with.
A reasonably straightforward medium-weight game – while its core ruleset is fairly simple the complexity in Amritsar comes more from the volume of things that you can do during your turns reminding me of a similar weight game, Stroganov, and how often in that game I get lost in my turns! There are of course more wrinkles in Amritsar than my ‘move an elephant, move some workers, take some actions, score area majorities, do some contract fulfilment’ overview above so take a look at the rulebook for more information or this enjoyable run through from Kimberly over at Rahdo’s YouTube channel which I enjoyed a great deal.
Solo Headlines:
Rejoice: Point scoring automa / easy to operate / chases a variable strategic objective / manages resources simply and effectively / competes somewhat intelligently - and does all of that with minimal upkeep and an easy to understand ruleset! Hallelujah. Indeed everything you need to know is printed on ‘The Maharajah’s’ own player board printed on the reverse of the human player board - no additional resources are needed to run this solo mode.
To explain it at its most basic the Maharaja has only four uniquely coloured actions that it can take – coloured actions that also match the colours of the workers in the game. After you have taken your turn, the colour of the worker that you used will dictate the colour action that the Maharaja will take. Given that you will be using a range of different colours yourself throughout the game, the Maharaja will also be regularly taking different actions – actions that are simple, quick and make this solo mode a joy.
I say a ‘joy’ but this is one difficult solo mode to beat - it doesn’t come with easy / normal / hard levels of difficulty, just one level of challenge with a couple of suggestions on how to increase the difficulty for those occupying a higher plane than us average scoring mere mortals. But that brings about something that I quite enjoyed about Amritsar’s solo mode - a good blend between playing against a point scoring automa but also feeling the need to slowly and incrementally grind up my own score play after play to get anywhere near to being able to compete. I can see this one appealing to fans of automa solo modes as well as fans of beat your own score solo modes. The entire solo game is about trying to play the perfect game, find the perfect synergies, pursue a flawless game, conjure the perfect storm - and it creates that sense at the end of each game of “I know I could do ever so slightly better, lets go again and see if I can just get a few more points” regardless of whether the Maharaja has been beaten or not.
If I had one tiny complaint it’s that in the solo game the Maharaja doesn’t interact with the workers on the main board - not moving them around the board as a human opponent would. It doesn’t weaken the puzzle at all – there is plenty enough to chew on regardless but I did ponder whether there might have been a simple way to make the mancala workers move around and make for some ‘damn, I was going to take those workers but now I am going to have to rethink’ moments. That said, the state of the mancala workers changes constantly through your own actions - enough that you are creating problems and pivots by your own hand. If I am making it seem however that somehow the solo mode is lacking in comparison to the multiplayer game then do ignore me as I would argue that I actually enjoy Amritsar more as a solo game than I do as a multiplayer game. While there are only 12 turns in the game those turns are brimming - moves around the rondel, deciding what mancala workers to move, taking an action, taking a secondary action, upgrading player boards, triggering bonuses, taking another action if your workers are in the same space as your elephant, moving up tracks, placing cubes… turns are lengthy, puzzley fun and even in my handful of two player games the downtime was noticeable so I can only imagine what a three or four player game might feel like. Solo however I was in a near permanent state of my own decision making bliss.
Simple, effective, challenging solo mode that plays in 50 – 60 minutes. A very enjoyable efficiency puzzle.
General Headlines:
The first thing to say is that this game looks absolutely beautiful - from its striking image on the box cover, its colourful and vibrant main board, those chunky and large elephants that roam around, the wooden Golden Temple that is built up in the middle of the board over the course of the game…everything is an absolute delight. It is always going to be a challenge for any game that chooses a culturally significant historical setting as its theme to ensure that everything is represented in as accurate and sensitive way as possible and while I confess to not being best placed to comment on whether that balance is handled well here, what I can say is that I certainly felt the warmth in the game’s intention and that warmth encouraged me to read and learn more about its wonderful real life setting, for which I am grateful.
You can also certainly feel that Amritsar shares some lineage with a firm favourite of mine from the same publisher, Sabika, and indeed I noted in the rulebook that Sabika’s designer Germán P Millán was part of Amritsar’s development. While Amritsar is undoubtedly a lighter game there still felt to be some DNA shared between the two games - not just in the quest to build historically significant monuments! First of all there is the use of ‘storehouses’ to hold the resources that you acquire during the game – you can try to gather as many resources as you like but you start the game with only one storehouse that can hold only four resources. Building more storehouses costs much needed resources in this already tight game so there are some tough decisions to be had on whether to survive with minimal resources and put them to good immediate use or to invest in storehouses and gather lots of resources to use at your leisure later in the game. Either way there were often those “aaargh, I just need that one more bit of gold but I have no room for it” moments that I love in games – the sinking realisation that the thing you had your heart set on doing is now not going to be possible because of one pesky missing resource and a Plan B needs to swiftly be found. I also really enjoy in both Amritsar and Sabika that while there are variable strategic objectives to earn some big, juicy, potentially game winning points, those contracts of themselves might be on show at the start of the game but you are going to have to either race to claim them first (at a hefty cost) or in the case of Amritsar build them over the course of the game into your player-board in order to activate them. Which of your starting four contracts are immediate priorities to build? Will you be able to build them all? Build any of them too early then start praying that the natural ebb and flow of the game lets you fulfil them easily.
There were a couple of other moments of familiarity between Sabika and Amritsar and while I don’t think Amritsar is as good a game as Sabika it is fair to say that most games are going to struggle to be held in as high esteem given that I scored Sabika as a 10/10! But I think Amritsar was very enjoyable and certainly felt like a more than worthy entry in what hopefully is a continuing series of similarly themed games from Ludonova. I must also remember that this isn’t a review of Sabika and this is very much designer David Heras Pino's game and I’d encourage you to have a read of his enjoyable Designer Diary if you wanted more insight into the game's development.
Moving on to an element of Amritsar that I really enjoyed – the dropping off of cubes from your elephant to compete in that clever bit of area majority. At first glance things looks pretty simple – ‘try to drop off cubes in the area that will score you the most points’ but you quickly realise that there is a lot more than meets the eye. Firstly, the practicalities of needing to ensure that your elephant is in the same area that you want to drop a cube off in - move one space for free / use precious coins to move further / not being able to move too far or face the prospect of losing points - all giving some nice moments to ponder. Then the realisation that in order to even be able to drop a cube off I need to ensure that I manage to get a worker into the same area as my elephant or the plan fails – so now I am having to perhaps sacrifice a better action purely just to reach my elephant. Choices, choices, choices! Finally a really nice touch - at the end of each round you score points for each district that you have a majority of cubes in and each district will be worth either one, two, three or four points. Makes sense to try and smash the three and four point areas you would assume?! Not so fast: at the start of each decade each area gets assigned a different value so the area that you heavily focussed on in the first decade because it was worth four points for the majority? Decade Two its only worth one point! No chance however of this catching you unawares as you get to see in advance right from the very start of the game what each of the districts will score at the end of each decade. Therefore a good tussle to be had between chasing short term points, having one eye on the districts that might score higher (or lower!) in later rounds as well as keeping more than half an eye on those strategic contracts that you are trying to fulfil as more often than not they will also involve area majority quests. Amritsar is to a lesser extent a rondel game, to a larger extent a mancala game but it is this area majority puzzle that felt the most satisfying. Or perhaps it was the joyful blend of all three elements!
Amritsar doesn’t particularly have radically different elements to focus on game to game – no real ‘this game I am going to focus on X strategy and next game I am going to try and focus on Y and Z strategies’ - though there are three separate tracks to try and move up each with a distinct set of bonuses and benefits on offer and I guess those four variable strategic contracts that you are trying to fulfil whilst not being radically different do offer enough to make each game feel satisfying. But Amritsar is definitely a case of ‘lets play again to see if I can do better’ rather than ‘lets play again and do something completely different this time’. That isn’t necessarily a critique – I enjoy having both of those types of game in my collection and Amritsar definitely held my attention for 12 straight plays and I suspect it wont be long at all before its back on the table for even more plays.
One critique that I suspect could be levelled at Amritsar is that is not particularly bringing anything new or ground-breaking to the table but I’d counteract that by saying that not every game needs to be innovative. Sure, I like nothing more than unboxing a game, exploring what it has to offer and stumbling on something fresh, new and exciting and feeling a sense of ‘wow, I haven’t seen that before’. Frankly though, I am a Euro player for good reason: more often than not I just I like pushing bits of cardboard around to get bits of wood to trade them in somehow for points. I like having a decent and appealing setting, I like having some nice table presence and with any luck some coherent mechanisms that all culminate towards some overarching strategic goal. And do you know what? Amritsar does all of those things and does them well. Things feel familiar, warm and comforting with a nice amount of challenge thrown in for good measure.
Sometimes that is all I ask for.
At a Glance:
+ Beautiful table presence.
+ Action filled turns full of options and things to do.
+ Area majority puzzle offers more than initially meets the eye.
+ Excellent, easy to operate solo mode that provides sufficient challenge.
+ /- May not be bringing anything particularly ‘new’ to Euro gaming but there is a warmth, familiarity and joy to be had here.
+ / - Variable set up changes the parameters game to game but there aren’t radically distinct differences each game.
Final Score:
8 out of 10. (Reviewed after 12 plays - nine solo and three 2p games)
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